When I saw this, I knew I'd immediately want a ride on it: a glass-bottomed hot air balloon designed to coast the Alps. Test flights conducted with guests showed that it's not for the wobbly of heart; many passengers experienced an uncommon degree of terror.
I can understand that! In a basket, at least you have a safe zone. When you see the world beneath your feet (and can't even detect what you're standing on because you don't cast a shadow) your rational mind must constantly battle your shrieking survival instincts.
Story time. A few years ago, some friends and I went to a theme park where there was an attraction whose name we have forgotten, but still fondly remember as the Tower of Terror. A tall pylon, with four sets of seats attached in a square so that you're sitting abreast of two or three others on your side, all with your back to the pylon.
You wait in line. Take your seat. The padded safety harness comes down. Accompanied by loud noises, the seats begin to lift, ratcheting up the pylon.
The sounds of the other partying visitors die down as your altitude increases, becoming ghostly, and then still. Figures below become unidentifiable and meaningless. The wind intensifies, and it gets cold. You become aware of your body and its fragility. <!--more-->
Then you reach the top and come to a halt. Even with the wind, there's near-silence: everyone knows what's coming and doesn't want to speak for fear of accidentally biting off the tip of their tongue. At this height, you can feel the swaying of the pylon and it creaks subtly but menacingly.
At this point, I fantasized that a German voice could have crackled over the intercom announcing that, if everyone would please swipe their credit card through the slot under their armrest to transfer two hundred euros to the park management and agreed never to disclosse what happened, we would be lowered gently to the ground and escorted out. If that had happened I'll bet you everyone would have complied -- and if some refused, the others would have happily paid their share.
It didn't happen. We just...
D
r
o
p
p
e
d
.
Now, I've enjoyed my share of rollercoasters. My boyfriend likes to screech the tires when he can get away with it. I'm no stranger to being jostled. But this? I can't explain it! Maybe it was the harnes, or the unfeeling attitude of the ride attendants, or the creeping doubts about the integrity of the ride. It was all of it, but none of them were on my mind.
All I could hear was screaming. Not excited shrieking, as on a rollercoaster where you voluntarily give over to your impulse and enjoy the liberating thrill of it. This was screaming. To the left of me, to the right, and behind.
Loudest of them all was my own, and that was when I discovered who I am, at my deepest core. For while all the other screams were girls' screams, high-pitched falsetto sirens, mine was the deep, throaty roar of a man, baby.
It means nothing, of course. This instinctual exclamation bellows from the deepest recesses of the reptile brain and says nothing about your personality, disposition or gender identity. You can't control it, but that's rather the point. That noise started fivehundred million years ago, echoed through aeons of evolution, thrummed through cold and warm blood, through sea, steppe and city, finally to erupt from your ashen, terrified rictus.
But still. When I wobbled off there, all of us scrambling together the tattered shreds of our collective machismo, I felt a quiet sense of victory -- quiet, only, because my voice was raw and it took an hour before I could comfortably speak again. I felt like I'd won a game I didn't know I was playing.
Which, I suppose, was just the last electrochemical spasm of my primate brain and its commonly-repressed drive for alpha status. Can't really blame it for wanting to stretch its wings after it was awoken, briefly, by a nice fat shot of adrenaline. Fair's fair.
So there's no shame in screaming like a girl.
But me?
I'm proud that I scream like a man.
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